I've been setting up cron jobs for the first time and have run into a problem.

The following runs every hour at 30 mins past, as it should:

30 * * * * /var/www/log/rotate.sh

But, the following does not run at 30 mins past 7pm, as it should:

30 19 * * * /var/www/log/rotate.sh

The date command displays the date, time, and timezone correctly. But, no matter what hour min combination I try, the cron job doesn't run. However, it will always run with only a min is specified and the other fields are set to first-last.

Any thoughts on what might be causing this? I've searched around, but haven't found anything useful. I'm probably missing something dumb. A solution would be great, but even just a hint to set me in the right direction of what could be going wrong would be great too.

Thanks in advance.

Hello and welcome to LinuxQuestions,

Can you tell us how you setup the cron job? Using crontab? And next can you verify that the cron daemon is effectively running with the command:
and post the output please?

Also, please post what distro you are using, that could be important to know where files might reside.

Kind regards,

Eric

Set up using craontab, logged in as root.

ps -aux | grep cron
root 17994 0.0 0.1 19664 1132 ? Ss Nov18 0:00 crond
root 15626 0.0 0.0 5920 580 pts/0 S+ 21:02 0:00 grep cron

The distro is CentOS 5.2.

Are you seeing any errors from cron in the logs?
Output from cron in the mailbox of root?



Cheers,
Tink

Can you restart the cron daemon and check the log after restarting. Put any relevant info here. I believe the cron log is in /var/log but might be different on CentOS. The only time I noticed this strange behavior is when someone manually edited a crontab file instead of with the crontab command.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thank you for your replies. The cron log was blank, I checked that it was set up in rsyslog.conf, and it was. I assume that means there were no errors.

Anyway, restarting cron seems to have fixed the issue and I was able to test a specific min and hour job just fine. I'm still very confused why it was an issue in the first place? Afterall, it was running every hour jobs just fine.

Hello,

Good to hear that it works, though you might keep an eye on it. Could be that just the daemon had a failing child process. If you consider the thread as solved please mark it as such using the thread tools.

Kind regards,

Eric